Question

What role did tyrants play in the development of Greek forms of government?

Answer 1

wrong subject

Answer 2

but: yahoo answers: In ancient Greece, tyrants were influential opportunists that came to power by securing the support of different factions of a deme. The word "tyrant" then carried no ethical censure; it simply referred to anyone who illegally seized executive power in a polis to engage in autocratic, though perhaps benevolent, government, or leadership in a crisis. Support for the tyrants came from the growing class of business people and from the peasants who had no land or were in debt to the wealthy land owners. It is true that they had no legal right to rule, but the people preferred them over kings or the aristocracy. The Greek tyrants stayed in power by using mercenary soldiers from outside of their respective city state.[

Cypselus, the first tyrant of Corinth in the 7th century BC, managed to bequeath his position to his son, Periander. Tyrants seldom succeeded in establishing an untroubled line of succession. In Athens, the inhabitants first gave the title to Peisistratus of Athens in 560 BC, followed by his sons, and with the subsequent growth of Athenian democracy, the title "tyrant" took on its familiar negative connotations. The murder of the tyrant Hipparchus by Aristogeiton and Harmodios in Athens in 514 BC marked the beginning of the so-called "cult of the tyrannicides" (i.e. of killers of tyrants). Contempt for tyranny characterised this cult movement. The attitude became especially prevalent in Athens after 508 BC, when Cleisthenes reformed the political system so that it resembled demokratia (ancient participant democracy as opposed to the modern representative democracy). The Thirty Tyrants whom the Spartans imposed on a defeated Attica in 404 BC would not class as tyrants in the usual sense.